


These Small Hours Still Remain

by Caseyrocksmore



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Parentlock, Series 3 compliant (sort of), Slice of Life, but don't get your hopes up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-07
Updated: 2014-02-07
Packaged: 2018-01-11 13:16:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1173498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caseyrocksmore/pseuds/Caseyrocksmore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They had her for thirty-six hours. Now all that's left is all there ever was: each other, the memories, and the small hours of the morning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Small Hours Still Remain

**Author's Note:**

> Let it go, let it roll right off your shoulder  
> Don't you know that the hardest part is over?  
> Let it in, let your clarity define you  
> In the end we will only just remember how it feels
> 
> Our lives are made in these small hours  
> These little wonders, these twists and turns of fate  
> Time falls away, but these small hours  
> These small hours still remain
> 
> Rob Thomas - Little Wonders

"How old would she be now?"

Sherlock, entering the room, observed John hunched in front of the dwindling coals of the fire that Sherlock had lit before leaving that morning. It looked as though John hadn't moved. In any case, he was worrying a worn piece of fabric between his fingers, and Sherlock knew that it still felt soft to the touch, though the smell of who had worn it had long since faded.

"Three," Sherlock answered, not needing to ask which one he was talking about. Not when John's fingers tightened in the tiny cap they'd had to fold over twice so that it wouldn't cover her eyes, sized for an infant much larger than she would ever grow.

John's Adam's apple bobbed, rolling down his throat smoothly and then back up; he knew the number, always would know, but had to ask Sherlock _just in case_ he had somehow forgotten.

Sherlock slid his coat off his shoulders and tossed it to the couch in a heavy heap. He rolled his sleeves up to his elbows to expose his forearms (littered with ancient scars, pinpricks and slices they never spoke of), walked to John's chair and wrapped his arms around John's neck from behind the chair.

John breathed deeply, pressed his damp face into the welcoming crook of Sherlock's elbow, and dropped the cap onto the arm of the chair. The scent of Sherlock's skin calmed him, reminded him of the first time Sherlock had cradled in his arms the tiny flickering life they'd had for thirty six hours.

She would have been three years old.

John could still taste the burnt gun powder, could still feel the thrum of Mary's heart under his hands as he applied pressure to her chest. The doctor in him diagnosed, weighing the probabilities even as her blood ran through his fingers; GSW to the upper thoracic cavity, pneumothorax, critical blood loss. Still: a survivable wound, had her blood pressure been lower, had the shot been inches to the right, had she not been _seven months pregnant_.

The light fading from her eyes and the words, "The baby," silent on her lips. The EMTs arriving too late, the frantic rush, the tangy taste of panic (or blood) in the back of his throat; the feeble wheeze of breath from blue lips, the jump of his own heart the first time hers beat against his palm, like butterfly wings.

("From death, life," Sherlock said, and John would have punched him, but for the awe on his slack features and the halo of light that the harsh luminescent bulbs cast in his hair. Instead, he named him godfather.)

The most agonizing thirty-six hours. The most wonderful, beautiful, wonderful thirty-six hours. He held her fourteen times. Sherlock held her twice. She was beautiful, so small, even ashen-skinned and limp in his arms, even with tubes hissing air into her lungs, even with the IV and the bandages and the whining of her heart monitor, alternating between too fast and far, far too slow.

Rolling the soft pink cap onto her head, folding up the bottom (twice) so that it wouldn't cover her eyes (bluer than Mary's, just as soft), the bones of her extremities thin like birds' wings, the fleeting smell of her skin left on the two things she ever wore, the cap and the blanket. (Sherlock never sees the blanket anymore, but knows it still exists. He suspects it lays under John's pillow at night. He never checks to see if he's right.)

"How many hours?" John asked against Sherlock's arm, a mumbled jumble of words that Sherlock could feel, the drag of John's dry lips over the thin skin where his pulse beat strong and wild, untameable.

A moment passed. "Twenty six thousand, three hundred fifteen," Sherlock said, his shoulders tensing.

"Since she died, or since she was born?"

John raised his head. The distinction was important.

Sherlock sighed. "Since she was born."

John nodded, pressed his lips a little more deliberately to the crook of Sherlock's arm, a kiss but not a kiss. They don't talk about this, about the shared warmth and grief, about the nights spent in each other's beds when the nightmares are relentless or the world just feels a little too cold. Sometimes John wakes up expecting to hear her cry out for food or comfort, even now, even when she would be sleeping through the night at this age; he still expects there to be a baby. When he wakes enough to remember, his feet take him down the stairs to the other bedroom, and he sometimes sleeps again, but not often.

"Did she look like me?"

When John asked the first time, "Does she look like me?" it was in the hospital, holding her up under his chin so that Sherlock could compare, Sherlock answered, "Of course not. All babies look like Winston Churchill," and John laughed and the tension broke, a little bit. An hour later she was on the ventilator, fighting harder than anyone that small should ever have to, and the tension hung between them like a curtain that Sherlock daren't disturb by reaching for John, no matter how he longed to.

(John asked again an hour after they had pronounced; they had wrapped her in the white blanket and carried her to the morgue. Without the tubes, her tiny, pinched face looked almost serene in death, like her rosebud lips would pucker in want for a nipple at any moment and she would wake from her slumber with a kitten-mewl cry. Sherlock didn't answer then, hadn't needed to. Instead, he held John in the first hug of many, her tiny body tucked safely between them, where nothing could ever harm her. She hadn't yet gone cold.)

"She would have," Sherlock answered this time, because he believed it to be true. The first time he held her, he hadn't thought of Mary but of John, had wanted to wrap her in his ugliest, softest jumper and never let go. She may have been half Mary's, but she was all John's. "She would have been beautiful."

John didn't cry, then, but instead tugged himself free of Sherlock's arms and shuffled into the kitchen to make the first cuppa of the day, hours off schedule.

Sherlock picked up the cap from where John had left it on the arm of his chair and turned it over in his hands. He had examined it many times (not as many as John had). It was one of the only pieces of evidence that there had ever been a life, no matter how short. In a box under John's bed there was a hospital bracelet that read "Baby Girl Watson", three photographs, an ultrasound printout, and a medical file. That was all.

Everything else (the wedding photos, the rings, all of it) had never come with him from the house, as though Mary had been cleaned from his life. (She hadn't. She lingered between them like fumes that looked harmless but were really toxic, slowly poisoning the both of them.)

And there was the blanket, and the cap. Sherlock gently folded the cap and tucked it into his breast pocket, over his heart. John would ask for it back the next day, or later that night, when he realized it was gone from the chair; until then, Sherlock kept it close.

John puttered about in the kitchen preparing two cups of tea, and Sherlock sat down heavily at the table, with all its gouges and burn marks. He had everything he had once wanted. He had John to himself, back at Baker Street-- had had him for years now, and still couldn't put the pieces back together, still wasn't happy. His jealousy of the baby (he acknowledged it now, he had been childish after the wedding, wanting to covet John from his wife and child) had disappeared as he held her, his contempt for Mary fading as her body cooled, and all he'd wanted was for John to bring the baby home to Baker Street.

He would have stayed awake with her all night, softly playing the violin, feeding her every four hours, changing soiled nappies. He would have held her to his chest, sang her lullabies he thought he had deleted, faltered when he noticed John in the doorway smiling at the two of them fondly.

He would have loved her.


End file.
